Saturday, June 29, 2013

The forgotten refugees of 1948

Jewish refugees from Jerusalem in 1948

A just and comprehensive Mideast peace is possible only when Muslim
states recognize their role in two historic wrongs: displacing one
million indigenous people only because they were Jews, and perpetuating the plight of Palestinian refugees by denying them
citizenship. Noah Beck's article in the Commentator has also appeared in Frontpage magazine,American Thinker, The Times of Israeland the Algemeiner :

Media bias also explains why so few people know about the 1948
Jewish refugees from Muslim lands. A search for “1948 refugees” on the
BBC news site generates 41 articles (going back to 1999); 40 discuss
the Palestinian Arab refugees of 1948. Only three of those 40 (dated
9/22/11, 9/2/10, and 4/15/04) even mention the Jewish refugees from
Muslim lands, and two do so only in a single, superficial sentence that
presents the issue as a claim rather than a historical fact.

A search for “1948 refugees Jews from Arab lands” on the New York
Times site produces 497 results (replacing “Arab” with “Muslim” halves
the results), while “1948 Palestinian refugees” yields 1,050 results.
Consider a comparison using Sri Lanka, another war-torn, multi-ethnic
country that gained its independence from Britain in 1948. The nearly
26-year ethnic conflict there began in 1983 and claimed 80,000–100,000
lives, many multiples of the total casualties from the nearly 100-year
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Sri Lanka’s conflict also produced
hundreds of thousands of refugees, including at least 200,000 Tamil
refugees in Western Europe alone. Yet a search for “Tamil refugees”
generates only 531 articles – less than 5% of the 11,300 results for
“Palestinian Arab refugees.”

Institutionalized favoritism at the UN has also enabled the
Palestinians to monopolize the refugee issue, which undoubtedly
reinforces the media’s bias. All non-Palestinian refugees around the
world (nearly 55 million) are cared for by the U.N. High Commission for
Refugees, which works under the guidelines of the Convention on
Refugees of 1951. But Palestinian refugees (whose original population
was under one million) have a UN agency dedicated exclusively to them
(UNRWA).

UNRWA’s unique definition of “refugee” includes anyone “whose normal
place of residence was Palestine between June 1946 and May 1948, who
lost both their homes and means of livelihood as a result of the 1948
Arab-Israeli conflict.” So, in addition to families who lived in the
area for generations, UNRWA’s definition includes any migrants who
arrived as recently as 1946 but were then displaced.
And because the
definition includes “descendants of fathers fulfilling the definition,”
UNRWA’s refugee population has grown from 750,000 in 1950 to 5,300,000
today (making resolution of the Palestinian refugee issue even
harder). Despite these problems, the United States continues to support
UNRWA (with over 4.1 billion dollars since 1950).

The rest of the world’s refugees are assisted by the High
Commission, which is mandated to help refugees rapidly rebuild their
lives, usually outside the countries that they fled. Jewish refugees
from Muslim lands did just that: they rebuilt their lives in Israel and
elsewhere.

But the fact that they quietly adapted and Israel granted
them full citizenship doesn’t lessen the wrongs committed by their
countries of origin. These Jewish refugees from Muslim lands suffered
legal and often violent persecution that resulted in immeasurable
emotional and physical loss. They lost billions in property and endured
huge socioeconomic disadvantages when forced to rebuild their lives
from scratch. Israel was unfairly burdened with the colossal social and
economic cost of suddenly absorbing so many refugees. So any
suggestion that Jewish refugees from Muslim lands don’t deserve
compensation is resoundingly wrong.

On the recent World Refugee Day, the Israeli Knesset member Shimon
Ohayon, whose family fled Morocco in 1956, called on the Arab League to
“accept their great responsibility for driving out almost a million
Jews from lands [in] which they had lived for millennia.” He explained
that “In 1947, the Political Committee of the Arab League drafted a law
that…called for the freezing of bank accounts of Jews, their
internment and [the confiscation of their assets]. Various other
discriminatory measures were taken by Arab nations and subsequent
meetings reportedly called for the expulsion of Jews from member states
of the Arab League.” Ohayon challenged the League to accept
responsibility for “the ethnic cleansing of the Jewish population from
most of the Middle East and North Africa…[and] to provide redress to
the Jewish refugees.”

A just and comprehensive Mideast peace is possible only when Muslim
states recognize their role in two historic wrongs: 1) displacing one
million indigenous people only because they were Jews, and 2)
perpetuating the plight of Palestinian refugees by denying them
citizenship. The first wrong requires financial compensation to the
families of Jewish refugees from Muslim lands, which reparation can be
administered by the states that absorbed them. The second wrong should
be remedied by granting full citizenship to Palestinian refugees (and
their descendants) who have resettled in Muslim lands. Both wrongs have
festered for too many decades.Read article in full

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Introduction

In just 50 years, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretch back up to 3,000 years, have been 'ethnically cleansed' from 10 Arab countries. These refugees outnumber the Palestinian refugees two to one, but their narrative has all but been ignored. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they fled not war, but systematic persecution. Seen in this light, Israel, where some 50 percent of the Jewish population descend from these refugees and are now full citizens, is the legitimate expression of the self-determination of an oppressed indigenous, Middle Eastern people.This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, which can never return to what and where they once were - even if they wanted to. It will attempt to pass on the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution. Awareness of the injustice done to these Jews can only advance the cause of peace and reconciliation.(Iran: once an ally of Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now an implacable enemy and numbers of Iranian Jews have fallen drastically from 80,000 to 20,000 since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Their plight - and that of all other communities threatened by Islamism - does therefore fall within the scope of this blog.)